Virgil Goode complains that Tom Perriello outspent him by $3,000,000. Does anybody have the faintest idea of what he’s talking about? Does this have some basis in crazy-math, or did Goode just invent this astronomical figure?

Continue reading " Maybe Goode spent -$1M on the race? "

Lowell points out that Del. Dave Albo’s district also went Democratic, with 58% voting for Obama. Albo was last challenged in 2005, by Greg Werkheiser, who ran a very tough, very disciplined campaign against Albo. Albo survived, of course, but Greg has been biding his time to run again. Next year would appear to be [...]

Continue reading " 42nd district went Democratic, too. "

Speaking of Del. Bell’s district being majority-Democrat now, it’s now public that Albemarle BoS member David Slutzky is weighing a run against Bell. Given Bell’s $406k cash on hand, this is a race that would require being the top priority for the DPVA/House Democratic Caucus, or a really wealthy sugardaddy or two, willing to put [...]

Continue reading " Democrat weighing a challenge to Del. Bell. "

I live in Del. Rob Bell’s district, the 58th, and I’ve been keeping an eye on the voting trends here. Perriello defeated Goode in this district by 25,826 votes to 20,996 votes, or with 55% of the vote. (Note that Orange County is not in the 5th Congressional District, so I substituted the presidential numbers [...]

Continue reading " The 58th’s move leftward. "

I recently established Richmond Sunlight Labs, a staging area to play with new technologies on the site that are in beta. My favorite new feature is Recommended Bills. After you’ve looked at a dozen or so bills on Richmond Sunlight, that page will list some bills that you haven’t yet seen that are similar [...]

Continue reading " Recommended bills on Richmond Sunlight. "

From the latest RPV newsletter:
We are well positioned to have a sweep of statewide offices and expand our majority in the House of Delegates. And, make no mistake, redistricting is on the ballot. Our ability to protect and expand our numbers for the next decade hangs in the balance.
If House Republicans had a lick of [...]

Continue reading " House Republicans to oppose nonpartisan redistricting? "

My political blogging, since 2003, has largely been about how the Republican Party is Virginia is crashing and burning. Their coming demise was obvious even then, back when they controlled just about everything—the house, the senate, our congressional delegation, and both U.S. Senate seats. To an outsider, I might appear something close to psychic, but [...]

Continue reading " The dying gasp of the RPV. "

You might remember the MZM building in Martinsville. That’s the consolation prize that the city was left with after Rep. Virgil Goode convinced the city to cosign on the state’s incentive package for MZM to move in. The company was exposed for giving hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent donations to Goode, they disappeared, [...]

Continue reading " Martinsville: Stuck with the check and a worthless building. "

Spending every waking hour obsessively checking on the status of the SBE canvas in the 5th District? Here’s a little something to make your life easier:

If you’re a blogger, just insert this code into your site to give your readers the latest numbers:
<script src="http://waldo.jaquith.org/recount/perriello.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
It’s updated every five minutes with data from the SBE. We [...]

Continue reading " Perriello vote-counting JavaScript. "

I wonder what happened to that investigation that Virgil Goode was going to launch into his Danville office staff yesterday. How did it go? We’ll be getting the results of that soon, right?
My guess: He wasn’t banking on a recount. If he lost, nobody would care. If he won, he could pull a Schwarzenegger and [...]

Continue reading " A Goode imponderable. "

Sarah Palin thought that Africa was a country, not a continent. I just can’t say it enough: the McCain should have jettisoned Palin around 6:00pm of the day she was announced. That woman is dumber than a sack of hammers.

Continue reading " It’s composed of eleventeen countries. "

Rick Sincere points out that I had no write-in votes in Charlottesville this year. There were very few on the whole, with most of them going to Ron Paul and Hillary Clinton.

Continue reading " No write-ins for moi. "

We’re following the Goode/Perriello counting pretty closely over at cvillenews.com, my long-time blog about all things Charlottesville, with electronic voting expert Bryan Pfaffenberger providing some really helpful analysis. You can watch the tabulation changes yourself at the SBE’s site, too.

Continue reading " Watching the Goode/Perriello tally. "

We’ll all be chewing over tonight’s election results in the months ahead. I’m something close to numb at the moment, so accustomed am I to losing elections. But I do feel the beginnings of the scales falling from my eyes, a nascent understanding of what today means. As I watch spontaneous celebrations break out in [...]

Continue reading " Obama’s and Democrats’ victory. "

Turnout here at the Stony Point precinct of Albemarle County is off the charts. Normally we’d have somewhere between zero and five people waiting when the polls open. Today it was 49, with another half dozen walking from their cars to the line at the moment that the doors opened. We had over 200 people [...]

Continue reading " Albemarle turnout report. "

A year ago, if you asked me, I would have told you Tom Perriello had perhaps a 5% chance of defeating Rep. Virgil Goode here in the Fifth District. In fact, Perriello asked me what his odds were a little over a year ago, and that’s pretty much what I told him, albeit over the [...]

Continue reading " How Tom Perriello’s race against Virgil Goode became an even match. "

Madelyn Dunham, Barack Obama’s grandmother, died today in Hawaii, just one day before she would have, in all likelihood, seen her grandson be elected the first black president of the United States. The 86-year-old was cared for by Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-sister, while Obama has been campaigning.

Continue reading " Obama’s grandmother dies. "

Elizabeth Bumiller’s profile of Mccain in the waning days of his campaign in the Times is well worth reading. She’s gotten an impressive level of access to the campaign, and it really humanizes McCain at a time when he badly needs it. Mostly, I came away thinking of McCain as an old man who is [...]

Continue reading " A tired, happier McCain in these final days. "

Goode 50%, Perriello 47%.

Continue reading " SUSA: Perriello, Goode within MoE. "

Well, if this isn’t big news, I don’t know what is: the Danville Register & Bee has endorsed Tom Perriello for Congress. There’s no endorsement in the 5th District that’s harder to get, none more important than the R&B’s. As they point out, they’ve endorsed Virgil Goode every two years since 1996.
The editorial board writes [...]

Continue reading " The R&B has endorsed Perriello. "